What's the first game pictured in your post? And I didn't know that there was a Galaga homebrew for the 2600.

Out of curiosity, are you finished with the audio for Draconian? Amazing conversion of Bosconian, with about the only thing I can even pick up on that isn't present here being the background audio of the arcade game. Haven't fired up the arcade game too recently, but there was something like music or engine noises in the background during gameplay (in addition to the sound effects and voice work that are of course already present in some form on Draconian).

It's called RPG, a test of a multi-color tile based display. You can wander around the world and collect coins, which are used to buy a shield and a sword from the store (you'll have to search to find enough coins to buy both). RPG has some interesting features, like the terrain you're on controls how fast you move, and some of the tiles are animated.

The other demos are basically images to see how far we could push TIA using bus stuffing. Do note that the full color bitmap is very flickery.

They're all available via that bus stuffing link. They all run on an Atari via the Harmony Cart; though some systems don't work quite right with bus stuffing, juniors in particular (most likely due to a cost-cutting motherboard revision). RPG runs on Stella 5.0.0-pre8 or newer, while the other demos require Stella 5.0.0-pre6 or pre7. I still need to update those to the latest version of BUS so they'll run under the current build of Stella, I've just been too busy wrapping up Draconian to do so. It's being released next weekend at PRGE, they're having a huge to-do about the 2600's 40th anniversary. I'll be appearing on the Atari Anniversary Series: Old Consoles Never Die panel alongside Al Yarusso, John Champeau, Tim Lapetino and Howard Scottt Warshaw (!).

One issue with the 2600 is there's only 2 audio channels, one of which gets taken over to play back the samples, so we decided to drop most of the background noises. We kept the condition red one as it helps set the urgency.

SpiceWare wrote:What we're doing in the homebrew community is just continuing the long tradition of putting extra hardware in the cartridge. It started off with extra ROM (the 2600's limited to 4K cartridges), figuring out how to add extra RAM (the 2600's cartridge port doesn't contain the required signal lines for RAM), and the addition of coprocessors like the DPC processor used to great effect in Activision's Pitfall 2. Sadly the 2600's market collapsed before Activision could pursue that any further as DPC has some interesting features not utilized by Pitfall 2.

Later consoles used it to great effect as well, I'm aware of a large number of options for the NESand the Super NES. I'm sure others used them, like the Genesis to pull of Virtua Racing, though I haven't looked into it.

Basically the homebrew community is not just doing homebrew software, we're also doing homebrew hardware.

Don't worry, I wasn't trying to dismiss this effort as somehow illegitimate. My favorite 2600 game, Pitfall II, has a processor in its cartridge too.

The speech from the arcade machine is difficult to understand as well. In Draconian's manual we list them as this:

Your space fighter is equipped with an advanced on-board SMART ASSISTANT (or ‘SMARTASS’ for short) which will verbally inform you of combat conditions:

BLAST OFF!–- You’ve entered a new sector and are ready for action!

ALERT! ALERT!–- Enemy in vicinity.

BATTLE STATIONS!–- Enemy formation is heading towards you.

SPY SHIP SIGHTED!–- SPY SHIP in vicinity.

CONDITION RED!–- The enemy is sending their entire attack fleet after you! Run away!

ALERT! ALERT! is listed at Wiki, while StrategyWiki says its ALARM! ALARM! or Alive! Alive!.

The samples used in Draconian were converted from the Arcade samples, so it's a case of "garbage in garbage out". Even though they're hard to understand, each phrase is distinct enough that you'll learn what they are over time.